America is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. Here's one solution.
The loneliness epidemic may be a societal issue, but it can be solved, at least partly, at the level of individual bedrooms. |
 | | Sun Bai |
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Sex became one of my beats as a staff writer at the now-defunct Mel magazine, where I primarily wrote human-interest stories about online sexual subcultures. Like my readers, I was drawn toward the unique and often bizarre ways people engaged in one of our most basic human acts. For example, I wrote about people who prefer to consume only pixelated and censored pornography, people who fantasize about being swallowed whole by their partners and whatever myth or supposed sex hack was trending on TikTok during any given week. |
Though they initially seemed unrelated, I found that all of these stories pointed to a much deeper problem afflicting our culture: an unmet longing for connection. Sex just happened to be the means through which that longing was being expressed. |
In my interviews, it became apparent that many of these online sexual communities and trends were taking shape in the absence of real-world intimacy. I heard sources speak of feeling lonely, just as studies and headlines began to put that loneliness into numbers after the height of Covid-19. The connection was obvious: People not having sex, people not having friends and people experiencing loneliness were all part of the same problem. |
What frightened me most about it, though, was that among the general public, there seemed to be a broad sense of indifference toward sex and sexlessness. While I can't exactly get people to have more sex, I can at least assert the importance of considering the issue as a cultural problem worthy of our attention. Simply saying that we ought to have more sex, as I do in my guest essay for Times Opinion this week, is one provocative way of doing that. |
| READ MAGDALENE J. TAYLOR'S FULL ESSAY HERE | | |
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